âClock itâ â ANC reheats old election promises in 2026 election manifesto

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In Riverside in Diepsloot, Johannesburg, more than 4,000 government-subsidised flats have been developed and handed over to citizens who were once living in informal settlements.

This is where the ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), chose to unveil its highly anticipated 2026 local government elections manifesto on Sunday, 23 August, in a place where it could showcase that the party was capable of delivering services.

Support for the party has plummeted from 64.82% in 2006 to just 45.59% in 2021. The dwindling support comes off the back of numerous, and regular, corruption scandals, increasing unemployment, heavily indebted municipalities and failures to provide basic services, including water and electricity.

The political party has begun its election season on the back foot, being one of the few contenders that have yet to name mayoral candidates for the eight metros while other political parties have been campaigning for months. It also announced some eyebrow-raising choices for its possible metro mayoral candidates, including current Johannesburg executive mayor Dada Morero, whose popularity has been doused by persistent water crises driven by ageing infrastructure, high water losses, and maintenance underspending.

Nonetheless, President Cyril Ramaphosa put on an enthusiastic performance at the manifesto launch, even dipping into Internet slang terms like âclock itâ, complete with the accompanying hand gestures, perhaps in a bid to appeal to youth voters.

While boasting of the partyâs successes, including pointing out that there had been no load shedding for more than 100 days and that there was progress in tackling load reduction, he also acknowledged the impact that service failures and deteriorating infrastructure had on residentsâ lives, and proposed recovery plans for ANC-run municipalities.

âAs ANC, we admit there has been progress, but there have been weaknesses along the way,â Ramaphosa said.

As a result, the partyâs manifesto is heavily focused on implementation. The manifesto includes many of the promises it made during its 2021 election manifesto, including improving municipal functionality, developing and maintaining infrastructure, and acting against corruption and nepotism. It also delivers big promises around the delivery of free basic services and accountable leadership within tight timelines ranging from 100 days to five years.

The six key campaign promises

Ramaphosa delivered six key campaign promises, titled âactionsâ.

Provide water, lights and other services that are affordable and work for all.

The party intends to achieve this by making electricity more affordable and prioritising investment in water infrastructure, including dams, pipelines and water treatment centres. This will involve a coordinated response between national, provincial and municipal governments to prioritise resolving water shortages and sewage spills.

The ANC vowed to reduce âexcessive relianceâ on consultants, outsourcing and tenders by building internal capacity within municipalities to maintain infrastructure. They will also upgrade informal settlements, ensure residents have access to their title deeds and introduce a more fair tariffs system with built-in protections for indigent households. Indigent households will receive free basic services within 100 days.

Create more work and investments where people live.

This will involve creating economic hubs and activity where people live, allowing municipalities to specialise in economic activities that are best suited to their context. It will also include investing in townships and rural economies.

Promote safer streets, cleaner neighbourhoods and healthier communities.

This will include partnerships with community policing forums, creating coordinated structures within communities to hold perpetrators of gender-based violence accountable, strengthening access to Thuthuzela care centres, and enforcing by-laws to ensure liquor outlets are not operating close to schools. Further, Ramaphosa vowed to clamp down on immigration law violations by allowing the Department of Labour to hire up to 10,000 more labour inspectors to ensure that employed foreign nationals have valid documentation.

Ensure municipal finances deliver peopleâs needs. This will involve clamping down on irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure, ensuring no unfunded budgets are passed and that money is spent within its allocated budget, improving billing and collection processes, and restoring municipalities to full health within five years.

Build municipalities that are run well and honestly. This will include ensuring those in leadership roles are accountable and are hired based on their skills and competencies rather than connections. It will also include clamping down on corruption, starting with conducting a clean-up campaign based on the findings of the Madlanga Commission.

Build municipalities that are accountable and listen to their residents. This will include increasing community engagement with municipal leadership, strengthening partnerships with traditional leaders, ensuring older people and those with disabilities are accounted for in municipal plans, and ensuring 50/50 gender parity in municipal roles.

Tackling electricity tariffs

One of the most contentious issues ahead of the election is electricity. Minister of Electricity and Energy Kgosientsho Ramokgopa recently admitted that electricity tariffs had soared by 907% over the past 20 years, stalling investment and hitting household incomes.

At the manifesto launch, Ramokgopa told Daily Maverick that one of the key interventions would include ringfencing electricity revenues to ensure they were spent on maintenance â with an expected allocation of 8% of the budget â expanding the free electricity allocation to indigent households from 50 kilowatt per month to 200-300 kW per month, and preventing municipalities from forcing compliant residents to shoulder the bill for illegal connections.

âWe are introducing a rule. Thereâs a threshold above which the cost of illegal connections canât be in the tariff. If you look at the current tariff structure, about 1.5 to two percentage points of that is as a result of accounting for bad debt coming out of illegal connections, and we say thatâs unacceptable. So we are disincentivising municipalities and Eskom inaction against illegal connections because then they would have lost that money,â he explained.

Last week, the City of Johannesburg confirmed it had paid Eskom the R5-billion debt owed, which nearly resulted in the power utility turning the lights off on the entire city. But the municipal debt owed to Eskom remains staggeringly high across the country at R110.5-billion. DM

Reporting originally appeared via Daily Maverick. Read the full source for additional context.